The MicroTransit Revolution Has Arrived: TransLoc Deploys New
MicroTransit Simulator

Highly-anticipated predictive modeling service now available for
municipal transit agencies to create new flexible transit services that
combine affordability and convenience to deliver the ultimate rider
experience

“The future of public transit hinges on shifting from a supply model to
a demand model and embracing emerging modes to better serve, satisfy and
grow ridership. Our MicroTransit Simulator helps agencies deploy new
alternatives to fixed transportation alternatives without risk. Now,
transit has the tools and the information that’s been missing to make
informed decisions on how best to reduce the cost of operations while
improving passenger experience,” saidRahul Kumar, Vice President
of Growth, TransLoc.

“TransLoc’s MicroTransit Simulator helps mitigate risk and ensures that
we’ll know everything about our microtransit service before a vehicle
even hits the road. The days of guessing and hoping in transit planning
are over. We see microtransit as the future platform for delivery of
paratransit and on-demand services in the region,” said Brandon
Policicchio, Chief Customer and Business Development Officer for Greater
Dayton RTA.

Given their public mandate to serve the transportation needs of their
entire community, municipal transit agencies are ideally positioned to
combine both fixed and flexible transit to help to usher in the future
of greener and smarter cities.

What will the rider experience (such as wait and ride times) be with
this service?

Which locales and how many rides can we serve with a given number of
vehicles?

How can we adjust our microtransit services to accommodate fluctuating
demand while keeping rider experience in mind?

How many vehicles should we use and how do we balance service quality
and cost?

By answering these and other questions, agencies can more easily
determine how best to design new flexible microtransit services that
deliver an optimal rider experience – all while mitigating costly risks
before putting a single vehicle on the road.

“One of the biggest challenges transit agencies confront today is a lack
of meaningful data when it comes to finding new and creative ways to
push forward these new green and smart city initiatives,” said Kumar.
“The MicroTransit Simulator was created to make it infinitely easier for
these agencies to successfully imagine, pilot and deploy microtransit
services running under complex demand and service scenarios. Using the
MicroTransit Simulator, agencies can now eliminate the trial-and-error
approaches of the past in favor of data-driven methods to easily
identify the most practical ways to deploy flexible transit solutions –
long before bearing any of the costs.”

2. Simulating service: schedules produced as though the service were
actually running

Simulating Inputs - Ride requests are simulated based on the best
information available about where and when riders will need transit. The
process of generating ride requests can be informed by multiple
datasets, including census data, commuting data and origin/destination
data the agency may have from existing services. Ride requests can be
customized based on information an agency provides, or it can be
generated entirely based on publicly available data for a particular
region.

In addition to ride requests, service design parameters such as the
number and type of vehicles in a fleet, hours of service, and vehicle
capacity are also inputs to the service simulation. Rider demand and
service parameters can be set to multiple values in a set of simulations
to explore the range of possibilities.

Simulating Microtransit Service - The MicroTransit Simulator
takes ride requests and service parameters and dynamically assigns rides
to vehicles based on an algorithmic optimization – just as though the
service were actually running. This harnesses the same TransLoc
algorithm that is used in live microtransit services throughout the
country. The output of the algorithm is a schedule of pickups and
drop-offs for each vehicle and ride, from which performance metrics can
be derived, just as they would be for reporting on a live service.

Hailed by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in
transportation, TransLoc is the technology provider of the most flexible
agency-owned microtransit solution designed to deliver the ultimate
rider experience. TransLoc offers predictive models that simulate rider
demand and fleet operations, the expertise to plan and deliver unique
future-proof transportation solutions, and TransLoc OnDemand, the
premier cloud-based flex transit dispatch system built for rapid
deployment and hands-free operations, empowering transit agencies to
remain central to the future of modern transportation. To learn more,
visit TransLoc.com
or follow us on Twitter at @TransLoc.